There is a sense, throughout both Nostalgia and its much later companion, that much of the importance in a post-totalitarian world of stories of this sort lies in the ability to story them in words: to make-believe the future is describable. The protagonist of Solenoid ( 2015 trans Sean Cotter 2022) is conveyed to/given visions of existences in other Dimensions, his access provided by the eponymous device constructed from a design by Nikola Tesla. The butterfly-shaped intertwining narratives contained in the Orbitor sequence, beginning with Orbitor, Vol 1: Aripa Stângă ( 1996 trans Sean Cotter as Blinding, Book One: The Left Wing 2013), are explicitly influenced by the work of Thomas Pynchon, and generate a sense of the world irradiated by obscurely networked conspiracies. Giants roam this world (see Great and Small) a central building contains the secrets of the universe (see Library) the music of the spheres is longed for and (deliriously) rediscovered. He is of some sf interest for his first novel, Visul ( 1989 uncensored version, vt Nostalgia 1993 trans Julian Semilian 2005), where an exorbitant use of the topoi of Fantastika are assembled (and re-assembled through the five disparate sections of the work) into a kaleidoscopic rendering of the fractured reality of a state like Romania during and after the plague of totalitarianism. Part visceral dream-memoir, part fictive journey through a hallucinatory Bucharest, Mircea Crtrescu’s Blinding was one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a bestseller from the day of its release. (1956- ) Romanian teacher, poet and author, active from around 1978.

Blinding by Mircea Cărtărescu